When I was a kid, my mother would sneak brussels sprouts on to my plate. I hated those revolting little orbs of bitterness – but Mother was wily. “It’s only a small one,” she’d say, as though diminutive size suddenly rendered the unpalatable acceptable.

I suspect Carlo Rovelli would get on well with my mother. He too is attempting to woo a tough crowd with a portion of something they find hard to swallow: physics. And he’s opting for a similar approach, issuing what JD Salinger would no doubt term a “pretty skimpy-looking book”, just 78 pages long, no doubt hoping his delicate touch will stir up a taste for the subject.

Born of a series of articles in an Italian newspaper and covering just seven topics, Rovelli’s book conveys a simple truth: physics is beautiful and awe-inspiring, its mysteries there for us all to muse upon. And his tone would give Brian Cox a run for his quarks. Elementary particles, he writes, “combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties and of the night sky studded with stars”.

Despite its austere title, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is no primer for the budding student, rather a curious paean to science. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and the cosmos are covered, but other bastions of the lecture hall, from optics to condensed matter, get the boot in favour of loop quantum gravity and consciousness. For each, Rovelli unpicks the basics before revealing the loose ends scientists have yet to tidy up.

And there is plenty of food for thought. “The difference between past and future only exists when there is heat,” explains Rovelli, deftly leading to the sort of existential ponderings more commonly fuelled by late nights and a bottle of red. “What is the ‘present’?” he asks, pointing out “in physics there is nothing that corresponds to the notion of the ‘now’”. The flow of time, he implies, is simply a matter of statistics.

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Rovelli has a rare knack for conveying the top line of scientific theories in clear and compelling terms without succumbing to the lure of elaborate footnotes. “Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space curves,” he writes, neatly summarising the ramifications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.His attempts at closing the distance between himself (a leading theoretical physicist) and his readers (who, he admits, are likely to “know little or nothing about modern science”) are perhaps less successful, describing his student digs as a “refuge from the tedium of university classes in Bologna” in the manner of a politician angling to be judged “of the people” by hanging out at a local pub. And Rovelli occasionally comes a cropper in his explanations, complacently slipping in references and terminology unlikely to ring bells with his readers. Einstein’s “box of light” thought experiment is bandied about to underline the great man’s scepticism of the later developments of quantum theory, but with no explanation of its thrust, the passage merely frustrates.

On the whole his spartan offering is a breath of fresh air. However, it remains to be seen if his pared-back approach could be married with a more in-depth take on physics. Capturing the imagination of a reader is one challenge, but delving deeper while retaining an accessible air is quite another: Richard Feynman, Rovelli is not. Still, perhaps his shorter form is for the best – in exploring the link between physics and the “self”, Rovelli’s occasionally florid tone is given full flight. “Amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes,” he writes, throwing measured enthusiasm out the window.

Rovelli’s approach might be refreshing, but it is still an acquired taste.